DINNER FOR TWO
McClintock was examining the bottle of wine that he had offered Uhlrich and Kristine Cardenas the previous day. It had cost him a fair amount of effort—persuasion, cajoling, and finally an actual bribe—to get a few bottles of wine carried to Farside, tucked in with a regular shipment of food supplies. Uhlrich didn’t waste his funds on luxuries such as wine, but McClintock agreed with the Italians: a meal without wine is like a day without sunshine. Even on the Moon.
None of them had touched the wine when he’d opened it for them. Well, McClintock thought as he pulled out the stopper and sniffed the wine’s aroma, all the better. We’ll have it all for ourselves; I only spilled a few drops when I poured it back into the bottle.
Kris Cardenas had agreed to have dinner with him, and McClintock intended to make the most of his opportunity. Cardenas was far better-looking, and much more sophisticated, than any of the women on the Farside staff. Trudy Yost had been amusing, almost pitifully pleased that McClintock had deigned to notice her. But why settle for an inexperienced kid when a beautiful, intelligent, and altogether pleasurable woman was available?
How available is she, really? McClintock asked himself as he bent down to select a pair of prepackaged dinners from his small but well-stocked freezer. Well, we’ll soon find out.
That’s the excitement of it all, he thought. Men are hunters by nature, and the thrill of the chase is almost as exciting as the reward at the end. He laughed to himself. Almost.
Precisely on time he heard her knock at the door. McClintock straightened up, kneed the freezer door shut, and started across the room. Take your time, he told himself. Don’t rush. Don’t make her think you’re anxious or overly eager. But he was.
He slid the door open and there stood Kristine Cardenas, smiling at him, looking fresh and tempting in a coppery red frock that complemented her thick curly hair and cornflower blue eyes.
“Right on time,” said McClintock, ushering her into the room with a sweeping gesture. “Punctuality: the pride of princes.”
Her smile widening, she replied, “I’m on time because I’m hungry.”
McClintock showed her to the sofa, then went to the kitchenette to pick up the wine bottle and a pair of glasses.
“I’m afraid this is all I have to drink,” he apologized as he sat beside her. “Professor Uhlrich doesn’t encourage alcohol consumption here.” Except in his own quarters, McClintock added silently.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Cardenas. “I never get drunk, anyway.”
“Never?” he asked, pouring the wine.
“My nanomachines take apart the alcohol molecules before my digestive system can get them into my bloodstream.”
“Really?”
“One of the unexpected side effects,” she said.
They clinked glasses and sipped. McClintock thought that the wine tasted slightly tart. California chardonnay? he asked himself. I’ll bet this stuff was cooked up in a lab at Selene. I overpaid.
Cardenas asked, “Have you decontaminated the shelter at Mendeleev?”
McClintock nodded. “I’ve got two men out there now, with ultraviolet lamps.”
“Good. That should take care of the problem.”
He studied her face as he took another swallow of wine.
“May I ask you a personal question, Kris? Um … you don’t mind me calling you Kris, do you?”
“Not at all,” she said. “And I think I know what your question is. Yes, my body is filled with nanomachines. Has been, for years.”
“They protect you against disease.”
“And keep me young.”
“But there are side effects.”
“Only one that’s harmful: I can’t return to Earth.”
“That’s political,” he said.
Her face going somber, Cardenas replied, “No, it’s emotional. Irrational. The product of ignorance and fear.”
“I suppose so,” McClintock said. He had no intention of getting into an argument with her.
Cardenas put her wineglass down on the coffee table, practically untouched. “Do you have any idea of how the nanos got into that space suit?”
McClintock shook his head. “Not the faintest. But once the shelter out at Mendeleev is decontaminated the problem should be solved. Right?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe? What do you mean?”
“Carter … those nanomachines didn’t get into that space suit by themselves. Or the dewar in the tractor’s motor. Somebody put them there, whether by accident or on purpose.”
McClintock felt his face creasing into a frown.
“You’ve got to find out how they got there,” Cardenas went on. “Otherwise, you could be attacked again.”
“Attacked? You think someone deliberately sabotaged the space suit? Murdered the man who was wearing it?”
“Perhaps not deliberately. But somebody, somehow, put destructive nanomachines into that man’s suit. And the tractor’s motor, earlier.”
“My god!” McClintock exclaimed. “How on earth do we go about finding out who did it?”
“Good question,” said Cardenas.
Dinner was far more somber than McClintock had planned. They talked about nothing but nanomachines; he couldn’t get her off the subject.
“There couldn’t have been more than a milligram’s worth of them,” Cardenas said. She was eating automatically, paying no attention to the food. Just as well, McClintock thought, the meal was bland and undercooked.
“They were gobblers?” he asked.
She scowled at the word. “Disassemblers, yes. Programmed to take apart a specific metal alloy: the metal that both the dewar and the space suit’s collar are made of.”
“Could they be an offshoot of the nanos that built the telescope mirror?”
“No way. That’s like expecting a flower to turn into a hand grenade.”
“But still—”
The phone buzzed. Annoyed, McClintock looked across the room at the phone console on his desk.
“Who’d be calling at this hour?” he grumbled.
Trudy Yost’s eager young face appeared on the phone’s screen. “Carter, I just got a call from Grant, out at Mendeleev. They’ve finished the spectrometer installation! I’m going to take some test spectra tonight! Right now!”
“Aren’t you going to answer?” Cardenas asked.
“No,” said McClintock. “Not at this hour.”
“She seems very excited.”
“Scientists,” McClintock growled. Then he remembered that Kris Cardenas was one of them.
“Go ahead and call her back,” Cardenas urged. “Let her know you approve of what she’s doing.”
Thoroughly disgusted with the way the evening was going, McClintock called out, “Phone: reply to latest incoming call.”
Trudy babbled enthusiastically for nearly half an hour while McClintock watched his dinner cool. By the time he got her off the phone, Cardenas pushed her chair from the table and stood up.
“Thank you for a lovely meal, Carter.” She said it mechanically, like a child repeating a lesson learned by rote.
“You’re not leaving?” he blurted, trying to keep the disappointment out of his voice. “You haven’t had dessert yet.”
“No dessert for me, thanks. It’s not good for my figure.”
Annoyed, McClintock said, “I thought your nanos took care of that.”
She grinned at him. “I don’t want to overwork them.” Heading for the door, she said, “Thanks for dinner. And you’d better start thinking about how to find who planted those disassemblers.”
Reluctantly, he slid the door open. Cardenas patted his cheek as she went past. “Thanks again, Carter.”
“You’re welcome,” he said dully.
He slid the door shut behind her, then turned and surveyed his empty quarters. He had taken special pains to make up the bed neatly. All for nothing, McClintock thought. All for goddamned nothing.
He went back to the coffee table and carefully worked the artificial cork back into the wine bottle. No sense throwing it out, he thought, we only had one glass apiece and Kris hardly touched hers.
There’s always tomorrow, he said to himself as he tucked the bottle back into his refrigerator.